Examining Nazi obsession with movement further reveals how they manufactured the idea of race

It's no accident that so much of the propaganda film, photography and artwork from the Nazi regime features automobiles, airplanes and other modes of movement.

"They were obsessed," said Andrew Denning, assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas.

In a recent article in the journal American Historical Review, Denning argues that by paying attention to the Nazis' obsession with mobility, we can deepen our understanding of how they manufactured and exploited the idea of race. Denning also explored this idea in a "Time to Eat the Dogs" podcast episode.

"The Nazis put in lots of work funding biologists, anthropologists and a number of scientists to give an objective definition of race so they could tell people what it meant to be 'racially German,'" Denning said. "They tried to make objective what is fundamentally subjective."

One previously understudied metric of "racial" Germanness became their unique balance of movement and rootedness. The Nazis contended alternatingly that Germans were by nature prone to voyage and conquest, and yet also deeply rooted to their homeland.

By the early 1900s, 6 million Germans had already left the country for the Americas, and a 10-million-strong diaspora had spread throughout central and eastern Europe.

"Germans of the time thought, 'I could be poor on my farm in Germany, or I could move to Chicago or Milwaukee or Buenos Aires,'" Denning said.

The Nazi assertion that the German diaspora would return emerged first as a rhetorical tool, but grew into a justification for ethnic cleansing and eastward expansion so that there would be room for them in a united German state.

"Race had to be manufactured in Germans' minds and everyday lives, and one of the ways they manufactured race was by celebrating this unique mix of movements that made them different from other people, and the actual movement of Germans themselves became a mechanism to get people to think in racial terms," Denning said.

Take youth camps and regional rallies, he said. They drew Germans out of their hometowns and got them to think less about their class or religion and more about national identity and their ties to one another.

Industrialized nations have long played mobility both ways, he said: Good for us, bad for others. One of the major undercurrents in global politics today, Denning said, is a shift away from those countries championing mobility as necessary for a global, capitalist system and a key metric of individual freedom.

"In the last five to 10 years I think we've been seeing a much more complicated attitude toward movement in the developed world that suggests that we have the right to fly to China to conduct business, to take trips to Tahiti and move as we please," Denning said. "On the other hand, politicians and states have increasingly cast the movement of groups who are not citizens as dangerous, bringing terror to Europe or drugs into the United States."

Denning is now writing a history of mobility politics and circulatory states in Europe's African colonies.

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User comments

It's not complicated. The freedom to travel does not imply the right to squat someone else's land and demand welfare from them. You go to other peoples' countries as a visitor, not a welfare tourist, and you leave in due time. Otherwise you're an unwelcome guest and you get kicked out.

And as a good guest, you also ask permission and play by the rules: you get a visa or other travel documents from the local consulate before you show up to the border and demand to be let in. You don't come in pretending to be asylum seekers when your own country isn't in a state of war or civil upheaval. Simple beggars aren't refugees.

Yes the US needs a more secure border. But we also need to remove all entitlements from people who have entered the country illegally including minors and illegal mothers. Our legal and welfare systems make a laughing stock out of our immigration laws and act as a giant magnet inducing people to cross our border at will. This is a purposeful attempt to tilt our political system to the left.

E & ms666, as far as I am concerned? You are both illegal aliens & should be deported back to the cesspool your daddys crawled from.You are such lickspittle quislings & copperheads. Hoping for the opportunity to stomp anyone you perceive as weaker than you.

"Squatters"? Tell it to the First Nations. The Africans, the Hispanics. You fail the test in Natural Law that your hands are not clean of criminal activities.Your protestations that others are copying tour lifestyle are sheer hypocrisy.

You want to deny others Freedom & Opportunity? Well keep one eye open when you sleep. Cause the people around you are observing how you treat those you claim to be inferior. They be thinking "They are showing us how to get what we want." The others watching you are thinking. Hard! "They'll never be satisfied with their own share if the loot. Sooner or later. they will come for me & mine."The Code of the West is:Do unto others & do it before they do it unto you!

RR Almost every modern western country is occupied by your so called squatters. People want to come to the US because of its opportunity and we do accept immigrants. That being said it is our culture that gives us stable laws and opportunity. If South and Central America had the same laws and culture they would also have the same opportunity as the US. Thus we cannot allow totally open borders to replace our culture and laws with theirs so immigration must be limited so that there is a melting pot.

I personally have seen many come here and milk our welfare system for all its worth. While working off the books we the taxpayer support their families and they send the tax free money that they earn back home to S.A. .

Right RR, disregard the real problem and condemn those who expose it. The US is printing money to support this agenda and others like it. Soon the whole Ponzi scheme will collapse lead to mass starvation as our currency becomes worthless. Hello Venezuela!!!

So that thread quickly deteriorated into populist politics, instead of discussing the article and its problems.

""The Nazis put in lots of work funding biologists, anthropologists and a number of scientists to give an objective definition of race so they could tell people what it meant to be 'racially German,'" Denning said. "They tried to make objective what is fundamentally subjective.""

This is not so far fetched, since biologists studies fairly objective - but differing - races among dog breeds et cetera; IIRC mycologists have the most use of their own concept. But among humans such constructs are mostly cultural constructs of little value (and lots or problems).

Ok, I'll bite on the non-science parts as well, since the opinions are so one sided.

The freedom to travel does not imply the right to squat someone else's land and demand welfare from them.

Actually they do in, say, EU, and basic welfare is both shared and useful to make migrants as productive as possible (win-win). Of course it has to be regulated and policed, how else?

US needs a more secure border

.

Not proven, and - since the unlawful migrants are mostly moving out - counter productive. US has historically, as similar nations, profited from open borders and inflow of capable migrants. At the same time those migrants - lawful or unlawful - are statistically relatively benign with regards to crime et cetera. they *dilute* the unsafe US nationals! And finally one daft argument among similar has been that "walls work" while they do not do anything against the crime/drug problems since they do not stop planes, boats, subs.

"Stupid is as stupid does." Besides being horrible symbols, what walls do in real life is kill people; not that the populist US raised-as-grifter president did not already try to kill estimated millions by exporting US abortion restriction policies with US aid programs.

Usually I cannot be bothered giving out a 1 but this previous post deserves a -1. Yup nothing works so get rid of our border and give everyone all the free stuff that they need. After all free housing, food, medical care and education are all rights and anyone who objects is an "ist"!

Nazis' obsession with mobility, we can deepen our understanding of how they manufactured and exploited the idea of race

Human migration and tribalism are intertwined. The first diaspora occurred when early tribes left Africa, fleeing chronic intertribal conflict across the continent.

Any species will produce more offspring than can be expected to survive to maturity. Humans began unnaturally saving theirs when they developed the ability to hunt the animals that had been hunting them.

The resulting overpopulation has plagued us ever since. And with each new life-saving innovation we create, the problem gets worse. There are no new niches left to fill but we are still pioneers at heart.

Religions gave us the idea of a promised land, enabling the god-given right to displace indigenes and take what god says is rightfully ours. Manifest Destiny drove the west to conquer the world. Nazi pioneers were given Lebensraum to spur their notions of a chosen people.

Not proven, and - since the unlawful migrants are mostly moving out - counter productive

"A rising share of unauthorized immigrants have lived in the U.S. for more than a decade. About two-thirds (66%) of unauthorized immigrant adults in 2016 had been in the U.S. more than 10 years, compared with 41% in 2007. A declining share of unauthorized immigrants have lived in the U.S. for less than five years"

US has historically, as similar nations, profited from open borders and inflow of capable migrants. At the same time those migrants - lawful or unlawful - are statistically relatively benign with regards to crime et cetera

And I wonder where you get your info tb? Your statistics combine both legal aliens - who can be expected to be more law-abiding, as they followed the law to get here - with illegals.Cont>

Media-favored studies use "self-reported criminal offending and country of birth information." For obvious reasons, there is little incentive for anyone, let alone criminal aliens, to self-report"

Real stats:

"The first report (GAO-05-337R) found that criminal aliens (both legal and illegal) make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners. Yet according to the Center for Immigration Studies, non-citizens are only about nine percent of the nation's adult population."

"the second report (GAO-05-646R)... even more disturbing... looked at the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens that "entered the country illegally and were still illegally in the country at the time of their incarceration in federal or state prison or local jail during fiscal year 2003." Those 55,322 illegal aliens had been arrested 459,614 times, an average of 8.3 arrests per illegal alien, and had committed almost 700,000 criminal offenses, an average of roughly 12.7 offenses per illegal alien."

"The 2011 GAO report wasn't much different. It looked at 251,000 criminal aliens in federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Those aliens were arrested nearly 1.7 million times for close to three million criminal offenses. Sixty-eight percent of those in federal prison and 66 percent of those in state prisons were from Mexico. Their offenses ranged from homicide and kidnapping to drugs, burglary, and larceny."

"One 2001 study that does take country of origin and geographic concentration factors into account found that Mexican immigrants "commit between 3.5 and 5 times as many crimes as the average native."

"But we do know one thing for sure. Every crime committed by an illegal alien is one that would not have occurred if that alien wasn't in the United States in the first place. That includes the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed by the 55,322 illegal aliens in the GAO study who victimized countless numbers of Americans."https://www.herit...activity

And finally one daft argument among similar has been that "walls work" while they do not do anything against the crime/drug problems since they do not stop planes, boats, subs

So how do Israelis do it? They patrol coastlines and waterways just ad we do. Right now most drugs and human traffickers are crossing inland. When Israel erected their walls, terrorist attacks dropped precipitously. They developed the tech necessary to detect and destroy tunnels.

Walls save lives because they discourage caravaners from even attempting the long trek northward where 1/3 of the women are raped and many are victimized.

And your comment

US raised-as-grifter president did not already try to kill estimated millions by exporting US abortion restriction policies with US aid programs

You fail the test in Natural Law that your hands are not clean of criminal activities.Your protestations that others are copying tour lifestyle are sheer hypocrisy.

You're making a tu-quoque fallacy.

It's a fallacy because you're agreeing with me that illegal migration and squatting other peoples' lands is undesirable, in order to criticize me and call me a hypocrite, while trying to argue that I have no right to demand checks on migration and welfare tourism. That means you're simply picking sides on who gets to commit a crime.

It's also a genetic fallacy, by putting blame on people who were born in a country or have migrated legally, for something other people did hundreds or thousands of years ago. This is how things are now - and the people who were wronged in the past are now dead, so demanding revenge and retribution now is just pointless.

You see, there is a way to get in legally - you apply for a visa, residence permit, and then citizenship. That means the host country has a chance to review your case and weigh the benefits - if there's more than enough immigrants already, they don't let you in - try another time.

Just because they don't want you there doesn't mean you get to then smuggle yourself in illegally. The reason why you're not wanted is because accepting more immigrants would do harm to both the host country and the immigrants - for example, a society isn't justified to import more poor people when they aren't dealing with their existing ones properly - for what little relative benefit the new immigrants get, the others are worse off for having to share.

That's also the reason why the working class is the most anti-immigration while the middle- and upper-middle classes are most pro-immigration.

The political elites see the immigrants as new voters because they know they're mostly going to be relying on benefits provided by the state (low employment rates, pre-existing poverty, high dependency ratio), while the working class are the ones who have to share the bread with them.

It just goes back to the political reality of liberalism: when your platform is based on helping the poor and downtrodden, you have to make people poor and downtrodden in order to have political power. That's how politics works: the fireman is the arsonist.

You see, there is a way to get in legally - you apply for a visa, residence permit, and then citizenship

It is also easy for mexicans to return to mexico.

"There are 48 places where people can legally cross the Mexico–United States border. Several large border cities have multiple crossings... A million people will cross the Mexican-U.S. border legally today in both directions... a "regular" Mexican national has to show a Mexican passport or substituting document to an immigration officer as proof of Mexican nationality..."

"Trump was asked if his unscripted remark in the State of the Union about letting in more legal immigrants represented a change in policy.

"Yes," he said, "because we need people in our country because our unemployment numbers are so low, and we have massive numbers of companies coming back into our country."

-Dems could have been calling for the same sort of reform all along that makes it easier to enter the country legally. But for unknown reasons they seem to prefer illegals. Illegals in sanctuary states and cities dont pay taxes but bloat welfare rolls and the criminal system. This requires more taxes and bigger govt.

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